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US probes Freightliner trucks automatically braking without obstacle in road (mlive.com)
10 points by MortimerDukePhD 11 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 4 comments



My VW car does this all the time - particularly in the rain. Including when my kid is in the car. Fun times.

Incidentally the last VW I will ever own. Although I doubt other modern cars are any better.

I’m fascinated by the use of advanced software systems in the context of human safety. What manufacturers seem not to understand - or perhaps do understand but face competitive pressures to ignore - is that when human lives are in the balance, a 99% success rate isn’t good enough. It has to be unreasonably close to 100%, or people will learn not to trust it, they will come to hate it, and they won’t but your product. Self-driving strikes me as folly for that reason.

Another example - also from my VW - are the audible proximity sensors. They are calibrated to panic when you get even remotely close to anything. Maybe that’s okay in the US, but here in Asia, it’s mostly false positives from normal driving in a space-constrained environment. It renders them completely useless. Am I actually dangerously close to something? Don’t know. As a result I just ignore them completely, then bitch about their shitty product on HN.


> audible proximity sensors.

Man, my driving instructors car had those. Driving around the neighborhood where I live had those going off pretty much the entire time. Makes one wonder how incredibly oversized the parking spaces are where the designer of that feature lives.


> Daimler Trucks said the trench plate does not represent real-world driving.

Holy shit, any automaker who says that needs to have all their vehicles banned from US roads immediately.


Sometimes a tiny metal object will look huge in radar. Yogurt cup lids and the bottom of coke cans are known for this.




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